About Performa Institute

The Performa Institute is a year-round think tank that fosters learning, critical discourse, and a deeper engagement with performance by directly supporting its scholarly investigation. During Performa 15, the Institute is housed in the Performa Hub.

Its talks, conferences, and public discussions convene leading scholars in a range of fields, from architecture to art history, cultural studies, and beyond, with curators and contemporary artists. The Performa Institute presents programs in a lively, engaging, and surprising manner by interspersing research presentations, film projections, and performances, showcasing a range of in-depth programs for the presentation and exploration of ideas and the exchange of research and knowledge, with a focus on the study of history and on forging a new intellectual culture surrounding contemporary art. Asking artists, curators, writers, and scholars to function as educators across disciplines, the Performa Institute explored innovative visions for the future of art, ideas in New York City and around the world.

Performa’s public programs preceded the biennial itself, beginning in 2004, a year and a half before Performa 05 took place, and nurtured the very ideas that would come to inform and lead to its creation through the Not for Sale series of talks at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. Drawing on this rich legacy, the Performa Institute was officially launched on the occasion of the Performa 11 biennial (2011), during which it presented over 25 artist-led classes and workshops, as well as the historical exhibition 33 Fragments of Russian Performance with the Garage Center of Contemporary Art in Moscow.

For Performa 13, in addition to 20 artist and curator talks, we presented our first artist residency with Jennifer Wen Ma, and introduced a new program of artist experiments with Derrick Adams, the Free Seekers Collective, and Ahmet Öğüt, as well as a special archival program drawn from the holdings of New York University’s Fales Library & Special Collections.

The Performa Institute is made possible thanks to support from Toby Devan Lewis, the Ford Foundation, Lambent Foundation, David & Elaine Potter Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the NYU Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions.

Day #1 of Eleonora Fabião's experimental collective performance on Wall Street, which meditates on verticality, possibility, instability, and vulnerability, openly displaying the tensions between profit and gratuity, efficiency/ efficacy/ effectiveness and experimentation, and capital orientation and political imagination.

Day #2 of Eleonora Fabião's experimental collective performance on Wall Street, which meditates on verticality, possibility, instability, and vulnerability, openly displaying the tensions between profit and gratuity, efficiency/ efficacy/ effectiveness and experimentation, and capital orientation and political imagination.

Jonathas de Andrade’s work reimagines UNESCO’s 1952 report “Race and Class in Rural Brazil” within New York City, creating an ethnographic experiment where the audience participates as viewers and subjects.

Asia Contemporary Art Week collaborates with Performa 15 to celebrate the Biennial’s 10th year of distinguished programming with a special extension of ACAW's signature forum FIELD MEETING: Thinking Performance.

Day #3 of Eleonora Fabião's experimental collective performance on Wall Street, which meditates on verticality, possibility, instability, and vulnerability, openly displaying the tensions between profit and gratuity, efficiency/ efficacy/ effectiveness and experimentation, and capital orientation and political imagination.

Day #4 of Eleonora Fabião's experimental collective performance on Wall Street, which meditates on verticality, possibility, instability, and vulnerability, openly displaying the tensions between profit and gratuity, efficiency/ efficacy/ effectiveness and experimentation, and capital orientation and political imagination.

Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux discusses his process for creating his first live performance and the myriad ways in which it differently explores themes long present in his work such as abstraction, memory, and dissonance.

Documenta 14 curator and former Stedelijk Museum curator Hendrik Folkerts and Performa Founder RoseLee Goldberg discuss the challenges of commissioning and curating performance in a variety of contexts.

As part of Richard Bell’s Embassy for Performa 15, Stuart Ringholt presents Anger Workshops, a work in the form of a group-therapy session where participants are invited to express their anger with, then their love for, each other.

Aboriginal artist and activist Richard Bell and former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party and artist Emory Douglas discuss their myriad collaborations, from sign painting to murals, and their global projects of solidarity and activism.

Day #5 of Eleonora Fabião's experimental collective performance on Wall Street, which meditates on verticality, possibility, instability, and vulnerability, openly displaying the tensions between profit and gratuity, efficiency/ efficacy/ effectiveness and experimentation, and capital orientation and political imagination.

Day #6 of Eleonora Fabião's public interventions, where she anonymously distributes the book Actions, which she co-edited with André Lepecki, throughout New York City—she leaves copies at gyms, bars, museums, supermarkets, banks, riverbanks, the subway, parks, parking lots, and disappeared bookstores.

La colazione di Leonardo pays tribute to the unsung Da Vinci masterpiece and builds an imaginary bridge between two of the world's most distinctive culinary cultures: the ultra-minimalistic Italian first meal of the day with the exuberant Turkish breakfast smorgasbord.

Ulla von Brandenburg’s ongoing exploration of the rituals of the Saint-Simonians, a 19th century cult often cited as the origin of early French socialism, culminates here in an atmospheric B&W video-installation.

The week of encounters culminates in a roundtable conversation with the artist, featuring presentations by some of the book’s—Actions—contributing authors and performance scholars: Barbara Browning, Pablo Assumpção B. Costa, Adrian Heathfield, André Lepecki, and Felipe Ribeiro.

Discussing influences and legacies in dance, this conversation explores the generational and transatlantic choreographic exchange of the past 50 years, and sheds light on both Bel’s and Rainer’s latest works.

Cassius Fadlabi and Lars Cuzner discuss European Attraction Limited, their collaborative 2014 project that explored one of Norway's most confusing chapters of public misrepresentation and historical amnesia.

South African collective Chimurenga presents a multi-tiered programming platform in the Performa 15 Hub, hosting a library-of-people through a broad spectrum of collaborators to create improvised bodies of knowledge.

Australian artist collective Wrong Solo (Agatha Gothe-Snape, Brian Fuata, and Shane Haseman) presents a self-reflexive three-part performance that speculates on the contemporary art world, developed in residence at the Performa Hub.

Brazilian artist Laura Lima discusses why she eschews performance as a term to describe her work, revealing a belief in the capacity of “things”, be they ideologies, objects, animals, or humans, to act in the world on their own terms.

A special program organized in collaboration with the Nelson Sullivan Video Collection and NYU’s Fales Library & Special Collections that features rare videos, portraits of people and places from NYC’s downtown underworld of the 1980s, and followed by a conversation between Juliana Huxtable and Ricardo Montez.

Terry Smith, art historian, Art & Language member, and author of the seminal essay “The Provincialism Problem”, presents a selection of Australian performance videos from the 1970s, followed by an in-depth discussion with artists and curators from the Australian ‘Pavilion Without Walls’.